Everyone knows that storage
growth has been at growing exponential levels for a few years now within
enterprises, and as a subset of data unstructured data is growing faster than
structured (tabular) data.

How are you handling the
unstructured data growth?

One option is via Global
Name space (GNS) (Please don’t confuse that with the old Novell IPX GNS ((Get
Nearest Server)) yes acronym reuse is fun.)

What is GNS?

Put in simple terms it will
do to file storage what DNS did for IP networking.

Or put another way GNS enables
your clients to access files w/ out knowing the exact location Or put yet another
way it’s federation of a File System (F/S).

The official industry definition
goes like this… A Global Namespace (GNS) has the unique ability to aggregate
disparate and remote network based file systems, providing a consolidated view
that can greatly reduce complexities of localized file management and
administration.

Global Namespace technology
can virtualize file server protocols such as Common Internet File System
protocol (CIFS) and the Network File System (NFS) protocols.

So, you might be asking
yourself how does global namespace help my enterprise?How many mapped drives to you have (UNIX
& Windows)?How many more mapped
drives do you need to add?

How much time
do you spend just managing mapped drives?How much time do you spend managing file locations?How much time do you spend performing cross
mapping searches?

Now multiply that number by
the number of admins and users who perform similar work in your enterprise.

How much time do you spend working
policies and access rights to these files?

Another benefit of GNS is
the ability to tie GNS into Microsoft’s DFS to ease your administration load
there too.

You will find lots of
competitive global namespace products out there in the market for you to select
from such as (IBM SONAS, Brocade StorageX, F5 Networks, etc, just to name a few)